Salt ~ the critically essential dietary mineral

Over the years, salt has been blamed across the board for blood pressure problems – despite the fact that reducing your salt intake doesn't appear to help reduce your blood pressure, according to new research. If your doctor has told you to cut sodium to lower your blood pressure and get you on the road to good health, a new study out of Canada shows that he may be mistaken… and may have put you directly in the path of even MORE health problems. Because less sodium could actually negatively affect your health! Researchers looked at more than 130,000 people from 49 countries with both high and normal blood pressure to see if there was a relationship between salt (sodium chloride) intake and heart disease, stroke, or death. According to the study, if you've got high blood pressure, keeping below 3,000 mg of sodium daily could actually make you 34 per cent MORE likely to have a heart attack or stroke! Even if you DON'T have high blood pressure, a low-sodium diet of less than 3,000 mg a day could potentially increase your risk of heart attack or stroke by 26 per cent. The fact is, you NEED salt for your muscles and nerves to function properly. And sodium is crucial when helping to restore your electrolyte balance – especially after an illness or a big workout. In order for HIGH levels of sodium to actually increase your risk, researchers found that it would take eating more than 6,000 mg daily. Yet the American Heart Association has been telling us for years that we need to max out at 1,500 mg a day. On average, we consume about 3,400mg of sodium daily – which, according to this latest study, would be considered a "safe" amount. But, of course, because it's an average, some people consume far less; and some people do consume far more. You can naturally avoid going overboard with salt by following the Paleo diet, which hearkens back to the days when you didn't eat what you couldn't hunt or gather. Back then, salt was so rare that our ancestors used it for currency! Fortunately, these days we have access to lots of different types of salt. Try a pinch of kosher salt – which has a coarser grain – or even sea salt, which can have more of a "flaky" texture. They've got the same sodium amount by weight, but because of their texture, the sodium in courser salts is actually lower by volume. More importantly, sea salts can be so flavourful on their own that you don't need to add a lot to season your food.

Wishing you the best of health,Dr. Glenn S. RothfeldEditorNutrition & Healing